I know some people have deep beliefs they hold true, and are willing to deny what’s right in front of their face if they have to. I also know it’s the Internet out there, where people don’t read past the first line or watch a video past the first few seconds. Still, the denial and — to be blunt — dickery is breathtaking. One person actually said they hoped the Universe kills me so they don’t have to listen to my "drivel" [that was one of the comments deleted, BTW].

Of course this isn’t the first time I’ve had someone wish me dead, or that I’d shut up. Duh. But what I find fascinating is the irony. One complaint I hear about critical thinking is that it takes away hope, takes away beauty, and replaces them with despair and the ugly nature of reality. And yet here we see people shredding their critical thinking to hold fast to a doomsday scenario that is as ugly as it is hopeless.

If they actually applied a bit of skepticism, they’d see the 2012 doomsday garbage for what it is. But they cleave unto it as fervently as a drowning man to a life preserver.

I don’t think I have anything particularly profound to add to this; I’m just shining a light on it for you to see. Be aware of this, and always remember people’s ability to be paradoxical and completely embrace a nonsensical danger while denying the real one.

Just checked over the comments that are left. I can’t believe that there is someone who is genuinely proposing that the Mayans could detect and track the orbit of an asteroid sufficiently accurately enough that they could predict where it would be thousands of years in the future! Even with our advanced telescopes and computer modelling we can’t even accurately track most asteroids past a couple of decades.

Where is your ‘The Stupid, it burns’ graphic Phil, not seen that in a while.

@6 Yes! Of course. Now you’re getting it. The aliens communicated with the Mayans via crop circles. See? They are doing it now but we’ve sorta lost the human to alien babble fish translator and all we get are pretty pictures and a bunch of insurance claims. Now here’s the amazing part guys, the Mayans didn’t use wheels except for toys right? Right guys? So they MUST HAVE KNOWN the dangers of roads and expressways. That’s why they didn’t use the wheel for transport. IT’S ANOTHER WARNING! The Mayans were warning us about the intergalactic expressway that’s coming through in December! The plans have been on file in Alpha Century for 3000 years!!!11!one

If you don’t believe me Google ‘the bees are disappearing! or ask the dolphins.

I never really thought people take this seriously at all! I thought everyone knows it’s like a silly joke gone a bit too far.

You would think so, wouldn’t you? Most people I know don’t really take it seriously, but they’re not all that sure about it, either. And then my brother-in-law informed us that he’ll be coming to stay with us in December, just in case the Mayans were right! He wants to be with family at the end of the world. (Don’t bother, people. I’ve already made the joke about his visit CAUSING the end of the world.)

But I wonder how much of this kind of thinking is caused by a macabre wish that the world WILL end. Like believers in the Apocalypse, are these people unwilling, or unable, to contemplate the idea that the world will continue on without them? Would they rather have the entire world destroyed so that there would be no one left when they die? I’m beginning to believe this is true, and it scares the hell out of me! What will these people be capable of when doomsday actually dawns?

Joking aside, some of these people are trolls but some… get really quite angry and upset, even vitriolic over the smallest intrusions of logic into their bubbles. It’s almost like a cult.

The sad thing? If all this energy, effort, time, money, and resources could be channeled to real science for identifying and mitigating space (solar storms/asteroids) and geological/weather based threats. That’s the only silver lining I can think of. An increased interest in space, our planet, and our stellar neighborhood due to exposure to this Mayan “death cult”.

And when December comes and goes without so much as a whimper… Maybe that will signal some sort of sobering up and growing up of humanity? Maybe that’s what the Mayans were really getting at? One can hope (and keep driveling on! 😉

Comments like those invoke Poe’s Law…
They’re just so far off the wall that there’s no way to tell if they’re serious or not.
It’s almost as hard to believe that people could be that foolish as it is to believe the doomsday bunk.

I stand prepared to accept the deeds to homes and titles to vehicles of all that believe the “end” is coming.

Folks, don’t just give your stuff away! I will PAY you, one cent on the dollar, for your property titles! Have the cash you need for that end of the world party! Buy that jet ski to take you out to the impact zone in the ocean! Get that all important cash you need to pay the priests so YOU can be one of the SAVED!

And I will guarantee your satisfaction! If the End of the World doesn’t come, you can BUY BACK your property, for only ten percent of it’s value! Even God won’t give you that kind of a deal!

I never really thought people take this seriously at all! I thought everyone knows it’s like a silly joke gone a bit too far.

Beware of silly jokes – once they have been unleashed on the internet, sooner or later someone is bound to take them seriously.

Another example is the “bumblebees can’t fly” meme. A bunch of aerospace students once “proved” that bumblebees could not fly, by applying the equations relating to fixed-wing aircraft to the bumblebee. Of course, it’s pretty obvious that a bumblebee isn’t a fixed-wing aircraft, which is what made it funny. Ish. Fast forward 10 or 20 years and you have people claiming that this prank proves that science doesn’t know anything. Or whatever.

The Old Mayan Overlords were too busy cutting up their privates and plucking out the hearts of enemies to worry too deeply about astronomy. One imagines that the ‘peaceful astronomer kings” actual astronomer priests thanked THEIR lucky stars every day that they didn’t have to wear their hearts on their sleeves. Even someone who hates math might be motivated to be the next Ramanujan in similar circumstances, and tell the kings whatever they wanted to hear.

“And when December comes and goes without so much as a whimper… Maybe that will signal some sort of sobering up and growing up of humanity?”

It seems paradoxical, but unfortunately the failure of a doomsday prophecy often only causes its adherants to double down in their beliefs. Read Festinger’s “When Prophecy Fails”; it uses the real world example of a 1950s UFO cult to demonstrate how believers often only have their belief STRENTHENED by the failure of prophecy.

I think a lot of people have fallen for the romantic notion of the “golden age”. I also think the vast majority of those people have never thought enough about what this golden age actually was to be able to define it. When did it happen? What qualities defined it? They just look at their lives, and at the world around them, and decide that, since things aren’t so great, they *must* have been better in the past.

There’s also a large number of people who, for a variety of reasons, view the idea that we actually know anything as a notion full of hubris. They’re looking for something to humble and humiliate the current curators of knowledge. I think many of these people are disappointed with the limitations of the physical universe, and want not only to see the current paradigms fall, but for them to be replaced with their own pet ideas about how the world *really* works.

It’s the old concept of special knowledge that we often see when discussing conspiracy theorists.

On top of all that, I also have a sneaking suspicion that when many people envision the “end of the world”, they see it in terms of their own personal action movie. They’ll be one of the lucky ones who doesn’t suffer, and doesn’t die. They’ll have their mundane lives shaken up, and they will answer the call of destiny.

Ed @22

I suspect “gone” may be a word of similar quality, given that the Mayans are still with us.

F16 guy @10: There are undoubtedly some who are that serious. When Harold Camping announced doomsday last year a bunch of people sold their homes and possessions, and some of them gave him the money so he could spread the message. There were also a few people early this year who sold their homes so they could move to Iowa and work on the Palin campaign.

I’ve even read interviews with some from both groups who are in denial and still waiting for the big event. The Millerites were not a one-time phenomena.

@23 I fear you’re right. It’s like doubling down on two of a kind. But maybe this one time people can surprise us all? *sigh* I guess there’s always Apophis Mania to look forward to. (side note: Do astronomers choose these names to mess with the doom cults? Seriously good marketing.)

Phil did a great job here, and the writing on the news show was pretty balanced, but the sad part is the overwhelming use of freaky Hollywood disaster footage that played on top of reasonable verbiage; if it bleeds it leads. Given how visually dependent most TV-heads are, for some the entire story could be summed up as “We”re all gonna die!!” Which is true, of course, but the hysterical footage fed the religious ferocity of the determined ignorance that has become part of the American social landscape. Creepy comments on the KSL story.

@10 and 14: I’m familiar with this as well. If they don’t take you up, then you have proved to them that they really don’t take themselves seriously.

Reminds me of the following situation: Two relatives haven’t seen each other for, say, 30 years. Both are 90 now. One dies. At the funeral, the other one is extremely sad, crying for hours etc. If such people really believe in life after death, why the crying? They will see each other again in much less than 30 years. I think crying at religious funerals sometimes indicates that people don’t really believe in life after death, or at least aren’t sure.

Even nonreligious doomsday predictions play to the sense that the universe is ordered and predetermined, not random. The true believers would rather the world end in a great cataclysm in their lifetimes than to be just a meaningless series of events.

Maybe believing the world will end in their lifetimes makes them feel like they matter. Otherwise they,like all of us, are just one more generation in an endless stream of humans and no more important than any of the anonymous billions that have already come and gone.

Man, I guess everyone was way ahead of the game on me. I’ve been telling my students for the last couple years that their best bet to make a quick buck without too much work would be to find people who think the world is ending and bet them 20 bucks it doesn’t. (At which point I point out that the world isn’t ending in 2012, and that even if it did, you wouldn’t be out anything anyway.) That’s a pittance compared to deeds to houses…

But what I find fascinating is the irony. One complaint I hear about critical thinking is that it takes away hope, takes away beauty, and replaces them with despair and the ugly nature of reality. And yet here we see people shredding their critical thinking to hold fast to a doomsday scenario that is as ugly as it is hopeless.

The ugly reality is that some people’s hopes and dreams aren’t for things as nice as peace on earth or being reunited with their loved ones in the afterlife, but they still cling to them with the same strength.

Phillip Helbig Says:
… I think crying at religious funerals sometimes indicates that people don’t really believe in life after death, or at least aren’t sure.

I’ve concluded that most people aren’t crying because they “miss” someone or because they’re “sad they’ll never see them again”, but because they regret the condition of their relationship with the person at the time of their death. Something went unappreciated or unresolved, and now it’s too late, and you’re left dealing with guilt or the nagging sense of wasted opportunities. It’s one thing to “know” you’ll be able to fix it in the Great Beyond, it’s another thing to carry that emotional baggage with you in the interim.

I think crying at religious funerals sometimes indicates that people don’t really believe in life after death, or at least aren’t sure.

Of course. That’s exactly what it means when they fail to follow the internal logic of their belief systems and thus nullify their grief. *gigantic eye-roll* Emotions don’t work that way. Ever had any?

One complaint I hear about critical thinking is that it takes away hope, takes away beauty, and replaces them with despair and the ugly nature of reality. And yet here we see people shredding their critical thinking to hold fast to a doomsday scenario that is as ugly as it is hopeless.

It might be the case that you are mixing up two different sets of people, i.e. those who claim that critical thinking removes hope and beauty, and those who remove their critical thinking in order to cling to whatever end-of-the-world scenario is currently in fashion. Surely the sets are overlapping, but most likely not identical.

(I see the same situation all over the internet. Some guys say “do X”, then when X is done, others say “why did you do X, that was stupid”, and someone enters the discussion, accusing everyone else of not being able to make up their minds, while in reality everyone had their opinion, it were just two different bunches of people raising their voices.)

Phil – I am from salt lake. Please don’t read ksl comments. I often go there for laughs but usually end up leaving pissed. Don’t judge us all by those comments. For some reason all of the idiots of Utah collect there and comment to each other. Sometimes after reading those comments, I wish the world was ending in December. 😉

My birthday is 21 December. I keep telling people that either my party will not be earth-shattering or simply that I promise not to destroy the world. This year. 😉 C’mon, it’s only my 49th. NEXT year, however, all bets are off!

I’m forced to side with Phil on this issue. The 2012 thing is the most purest, distilled nonsense imaginable.
It’s outlandish, improbable, indeed, totally impossible. After all, HOW can the world end in December 2012 when it had already ended on April 12, 1945!

Wow, those Mayans! OK, they blew it on the calendar, but hey, you gotta hand it to them in one major area…..They figured out a way to create a marketable brand centuries into the future…..Talk about Genius!!….Maybe the marketing gurus at various corporations could learn a thing or two from this lost civilization.